The
first challenge of researching works by Richard Rufus
is finding them.

From a
medievalist's perspective, the 13th-century
scholastic philosopher was modest to a fault. In
1238, Rufus joined the Franciscan Order and took the
ideal of humility seriously; he cites himself only in
the third person ­ if at all ­ in most of his
writing. As a result, his works were lost for close
to six centuries.

Stanford
Research Professor Rega Wood, who specializes in the
history of philosophy, deserves credit for
discovering many of them. She is heading the Richard
Rufus of Cornwall Project, which recently won a grant
of $110,000 from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH). It was one of only 35 collaborative
projects the NEH decided to fund this year.

The
project aims to produce an estimated 20 annotated
volumes of Rufus' writings ­ a definitive
compilation of his surviving works. The project
already is making waves in the field of intellectual
history and is bound to have a sweeping effect on how
scholars understand the medieval intellectual world.

"Wood
and her recommenders are not exaggerating when they
claim that her work on Richard Rufus of Cornwall will
force a revision of the standard account of
13th-century intellectual history," wrote one
NEH project reviewer. "Wood's discovery will
make necessary not only a new chronology, but a new
characterization of the Latin response to Aristotle's
natural philosophy work. It will call for new
textbooks, new syntheses and new course
lectures."

The
scholar

Wood's
office is tucked away on the third floor of Green
Library, where she labors daily over digitized and
microfiched versions of 13th-century texts by Rufus.
A New Yorker cartoon that hangs on the office
door shows a giant dog sitting on a couch between a
man and a woman. The caption reads: "Rufus here
is the center of our life."

Wood
came to Stanford last year after joining the faculty
in 1999. The university offered her seminar and
reading rooms to share with medievalists and
classicists ­ amenities for which she said she is
very grateful.

From
1996 to 2000, Wood was an adjunct professor and
senior research scholar at Yale. For 20 years prior
to her stint at Yale, she served as a professor at
the Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure
University. She holds master's and doctoral degrees
from Cornell University.

Wood has
served as an associate editor for several projects
involving the edition and annotation of works by
medieval thinkers. For example, between 1976 and 1983
she helped to work on an enormous project of editing
and annotating the writings of William of Ockham (of
"Ockham's razor" fame). That series of
volumes was completed in 1988.

Rufus,
who was born around the beginning of the 13th
century, taught at the University of Paris and at
Oxford between 1235 and 1255. He gave the earliest
known lectures on Aristotelian psychology, physics
and metaphysics in the Western world. When he began
teaching in Paris, lecturing on Aristotle's libri
naturales, which include these subjects, was
forbidden. But by the time he left, all students were
tested on these works. A major change took place in
the university's curriculum between 1231 and 1255,
and Wood bets that Rufus had a lot to do with it.

For the
most part, the conventional wisdom among intellectual
historians has been that, before 1250, scholars were
capable only of dully paraphrasing Aristotle's ideas
without critical insight.

"But
even the little we have already learned about Rufus'
early teaching of Aristotelian natural philosophy at
the University of Paris shows that the standard
account is mistaken," Wood said. "Rufus
applied rigorous Aristotelian reasoning to topics as
diverse as physics and natural theology, often
modifying or rejecting Aristotle's own
solutions."

In
addition, Rufus was probably a great teacher.

"Only
dynamic teaching could have made Aristotle's libri
naturales required reading 20 years after
lecturing on them was banned," Wood said.

But by
1400, most of his works were lost. Still, the
greatest minds of early-modern Europe, such as
Galileo, owe something to Rufus, Wood said. For
example, Rufus rejected Aristotle's account of
projectile motion. Antonius Menu, a 16th-century
Aristotelian who influenced Galileo, challenged the
Aristotelian account of projectile motion in much the
same terms Rufus did.

Around
1945, a Vatican scriptor discovered some of Rufus'
lectures on Aristotle's metaphysics. Working with the
esteemed medievalist and Vatican Library Prefect
Leonard Boyle, who died in 1999, Professor Timothy
Noone of Catholic University authenticated the
lectures in 1987.

Wood
discovered and authenticated most of Rufus' other
philosophical works now known to exist. Finding and
identifying the manuscripts, however, required a
great deal of detective work.

Discovery
in East Germany

It all
began when Wood was transcribing and annotating
Ockham's lectures on physics. One of her projects for
the edition was to find out more about Ockham's
intellectual connection with one of his enemies, a
philosopher-theologian named Walter Burley. There
were collections of Burley's writings in Erfurt, a
city that was then within the East German Communist
bloc.

At
first, Wood had difficulty convincing the East German
government to allow her behind the Wall. Eventually,
she was granted a tourist visa. And as soon as she
saw the manuscripts, stored in the Amplonianum in
Erfurt, she knew they hadn't been written by Burley.
The manuscripts had writing on the top line of their
ink "frames." The practice of writing on
the top line stopped around 1250, and Burley hadn't
written anything until the 1290s.

"That
took me five minutes to discover. And then it took me
10 years to figure out who the author was," Wood
said.

Wood is
working on the Rufus project with collaborators from
Canada, France and New Zealand. Her principal
collaborator is philosophy Professor Neil Lewis of
Georgetown University.

There is
still a lot of work to be done before the project is
completed, but Wood said she is in for the long haul.
In the meantime, Rufus will, in all likelihood,
continue to be the center of her life.